After about 100 metres, I worked out that I wanted to spend my ride in sunshine. It was utterly freezing in the shade. Thankfully there was no breeze, so it was not nasty. It was just cold.
I did the reverse of my normal long ride home, and saw a few things along the way worth mentioning.
We now have a council graffiti removal service. I've seen their truck wandering around the suburbs when I have been out and about, but until today, I had never seen them in action. I thought that they'd use high pressure hoses and cleaning agents to remove the graffiti, but most of the space in the truck seemed to be consumed by tins of paint. As I went past, one bloke was pouring paint into a roller tray and getting ready to paint over something.
I noticed afterwards that they had painted a section of the building in the right of the photo - I noticed it because they had painted it a different colour.
I have included this rather boring looking house because for years, it has been a burnt out shell. I have no idea when it burnt down, but it looks like the rebuild has only just been completed. I always wanted to go for a wander through it when it was just charcoal'd beams and ash. Bugger.
What gets me though is it must have been 2-3 years at least since the fire. If it takes that long to process an insurance claim and get a place rebuilt, make sure your policy covers you renting somewhere else for a few years!
Yes, the sun was shining and the sky was blue and it was a wonderful day (although brisk), and I had to put up (as usual) with this stupid path.
If there is one thing you quickly learn when you start cycling, it's that all the cycling routes are full of 'missing links'. The biggest impediment to me taking the eldest out on a road ride is these missing links. You get a nice stretch of safe cycling, and then you are dumped onto a 10 lane freeway with trucks doing 150 km/h.
OK, I exagerate slightly. But I reckon more families would be out pedalling if they had a safe route from end to end.
I don't expect to drive to say Canberra and find that the highway in sections is a one lane, gravel goat track. Or that bridges are missing and that one has to ford rivers the old way. Or that a road just finishes at the side of a paddock and starts up again 300 metres away on the other side of the field. Roads are complete from end to end. Why aren't our bike routes?
I like the scenic aspect of taking this path, but it shits me to take it as it is a crap path for riding. It is old, lumpy, winding and most of all, too narrow for bikes. It is great for walking the dog, but horrid on a bike.
I have to take it though as it is the only safe route for me if I am coming from the Gladesville Bridge, which is in the left of the photo. There is no other way, apart from taking Lyons Road, and that is a death trap. If you resurfaced the old, lumpen concrete road that destroys spokes with smoothe asphalt, and took away the speeding buses, and removed all the idiot wogs in tooled up rice burners and bad haircuts with a mobile phone glued to their ear and doof-doof booming out and evaporated all the mums in Landcruisers picking up Angella-Maiy from school, I would still think twice about taking Lyons Road.
This pathway is still too bloody narrow. I can live with that on days like today, when no one else is stupid enough to go out into the freezing air, but in summer, I am constantly ringing my bell at pedestrians that meander all over it without a thought to anyone else who might want to use it.
It just needs another foot or two of concrete on the side, and it would be great. Why is it so hard to do things properly? It's been done in a half-arsed way, so it is rooted.
Your taxes at work.
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